Tests Show Batman: Arkham City Requires a High-end Notebook GPU

By David Eitelbach | Dec 14, 2011 05:48 PM EDT

Here at LAPTOP Magazine we recently set out to determine which notebooks have what it takes to run today’s hottest PC game, Batman: Arkham City. To that end, we put six of the latest laptops through their paces with the brand-new, hard-hitting Batman: Arkham City, and the results weren’t pretty. Featuring the latest graphical innovations of DirectX 11, Arkham City stuttered along on almost every system we tested.

Additionally, we used a Dell Inspiron 14 as a baseline for our tests. Equipped with only an Intel integrated graphics card, the Inspiron — as expected — barely managed to run the game even at its lowest settings, achieving a measly 20 fps with 1366 x 768 resolution, detail level set to Medium, and every graphical feature disabled. DirectX 11 was unavailable in the settings menu.

Surprisingly, many of the latest notebooks fared little better. Running with DirectX 11 disabled and default settings, only two of the laptops, the ASUS U46S and Alienware M18X, broke 30 fps.

Turning on DirectX 11 caused the fps to drop precipitously. Running the game at 1366 x 768, with DirectX 11 enabled and graphics set to high, the HP EliteBook 8560w achieved a barely-playable 23 fps and the Alienware M18X a snappy 43 fps, but of the six notebooks we tested only these two broke the 20 fps mark — considered by many to be the minimum playable fps.

Playing the game with DirectX11 enabled, settings at high, and in each system’s native resolution, performance became downright abysmal, with most systems (excluding the Alienware) averaging between 10-13 fps.

It’s clear from the test results that DirectX 11 causes a massive decrease in fps on every system except for the Alienware M18X and its dual Nvidia GeForce GTX 580M chips. In fact, only the Alienware consistently offered performance that we consider acceptable for gaming, averaging 34 fps with Arkham City‘s settings maxed out and 55 fps using the default settings and DirectX 11 disabled.

We should note that Rocksteady, the maker of Arkham City, recently released a patch that purports to fix the DirectX 11 performance issues for 64-bit Windows 7 users; however, we performed our tests before the patch was released and were unable to verify if performance has indeed improved. Regardless, most of the notebooks struggled to run the game even with DirectX 11 disabled. Clearly, if you’re looking to play the most modern games on the go, be prepared to buy an expensive rig.

The second to last sentence of this article invalidates everything that came before it:

“We should note that Rocksteady, the maker of Arkham City, recently released a patch that purports to fix the DirectX 11 performance issues for 64-bit Windows 7 users; however, we performed our tests before the patch was released and were unable to verify if performance has indeed improved.”